CAMBODIA: And Now the Horror of Famine

Help is on the way, but will it be enough and in time?

They came by the thousands, eyes downcast, silently edging through the high grass near the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. Men without legs, hobbling on crutches. Women in rags, staggering beneath the weight of wooden poles hung with pots and pans, clothing and bedrolls, hatchets and rubber sandals. Children, some covered with sores, many of them naked, stumbling along at the heels of their parents.

“It was like a parade of zombies,” TIME Hong Kong Bureau Chief Marsh Clark reported from Bangkok last week. “For those who witnessed the macabre march into Thailand, it was an unforgettable reminder that a nation is in its death throes. All of the refugees were clad in black, appropriately, for they are the walking dead. There was no imagining what horrors they had witnessed and survived, or perhaps even committed, since some of them are cadres of the ruthless and decimated Khmer Rouge army. After a few days of rest and replenishment in Thailand, they will probably have to return, lame and sick and malnourished, to their dreaded homeland: Cambodia.”

In the 4½ years since Phnom-Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, more than a third of the population of Cambodia, once estimated at 8 million, has perished from war, disease and the genocidal policies of the murderous Pol Pot regime. Last week, as the Vietnamese prepared for a final onslaught on sanctuaries near the Thai border used by the Pol Pot forces, Cambodia faced yet another horror: a famine. At least 2 million people are believed to be on the verge of death by starvation or disease. Many have been reduced to eating the leaves off trees, peeling the bark and boiling it, digging for tubers and roots. Malaria is commonplace, as is a severe form of bleeding dysentery. Several French doctors who visited the country believe an outbreak of bubonic plague may be imminent.

Says Farouk Abdel Nabi, an Egyptian with the World Food Program, a United Nations agency operating in Bangkok: “I can tell you after what I have seen I am willing to kill myself to get food for these people.” Says a diplomat in Thailand: “The Khmers are teetering on the brink of being extinguished as a race. They will perish unless something is done right now and very fast.”

International relief agencies, along with the European Community, Japan, Australia, Britain and the U.S. are mounting a substantial rescue operation expected to cost $110 million over the next six months. State Department officials in Washington said last week that the U.S. will give $7 million in emergency food and money as an initial contribution. Two bills are pending in the House of Representatives, one authorizing $20 million in Cambodian relief for fiscal 1980, the other providing for $30 million. Says Republican Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, co-sponsor of the latter measure: “If we fail to mobilize the resources of the world, we will be guilty of the crime of silence as we stand by and watch the condemned people of Cambodia march through what has been termed the Auschwitz of Asia on the road to death.”

Until now, attempts to get food to the starving Khmers have been hampered by red tape and the anarchic conditions inside Cambodia. The World Food Program, UNICEF and the International Red Cross have been supplying emergency rations to the refugees who have fled into Thailand as well as to the 80,000 Thais who have been displaced from their border villages by the fighting. Initially, Hanoi and the regime of Heng Samrin in Phnom-Penh objected to the relief operation because many of the refugees being helped were considered members or supporters of the Khmer Rouge. But it now appears that relief agencies will be allowed to set up offices in Phnom-Penh to monitor the distribution of food, thus helping ensure that it will reach starving civilians and not the battling armies. For many Cambodians, aid will arrive too late. The country needs a minimum of 700 tons of food per day, and only a fraction of that is arriving.

Famine is only the latest in a series of wrenching tragedies that have befallen Cambodia since it first became engulfed by the Indochina war in 1970. Following the Communist takeover by China-backed Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1975, between 2 million and 3 million Cambodians were systematically murdered or otherwise eliminated under a genocidal “purification” policy. It was aimed at destroying the educated class and creating a peasant society. Some journalists who have visited the country have seen mass graves and torture camps reminiscent of Dachau and Auschwitz.

In December 1978, Viet Nam invaded Cambodia, swiftly managed to depose Pol Pot and installed Samrin as President. In fierce fighting against the surviving Khmer Rouge cadres, food became a military weapon on both sides. Explained a Western military analyst in Bangkok last week: “If you can’t grow food, you can’t eat, and if you can’t eat, you can’t fight.” Rice crops have been destroyed and planting new fields has become dangerous. Pol Pot’s forces harass farmers in areas controlled by Viet Nam, while the Vietnamese do their best to prevent food supplies from getting to the Khmer Rouge.

From his headquarters in North Korea, exiled Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who adroitly juggled the perennially factious forces in Cambodia before his ouster in 1970, announced that he was launching a new effort to return his country to political neutrality. The Prince, who may be the only figure with enough universal appeal to unite the country, said that he was establishing a non-Communist guerrilla force as an alternative to both the Pol Pot and the Heng Samrin regimes.